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A Founder’s at Home

Hamilton Grange Alexander Hamilton's house is reopening at its new site, in St. Nicholas Park in Hamilton Heights. The structure, built in 1802 and relocated twice, has undergone a $14.5 million renovation.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

When you look at Alexander Hamilton’s home comfortably nestled on the sloping hillside of St. Nicholas Park in an area of northern Manhattan that has long been known as Hamilton Heights, it almost seems to be ... well ... at home.

Admittedly there are a few jarring juxtapositions with nearby buildings, none of which can claim anything close to its 1802 vintage. And there is the sense you often have in New York City when a free-standing house looks as though it should have far more space surrounding it than it does.

And originally this two-story house did indeed sit atop a plot of land — a little over 32 acres — that Hamilton purchased here and named the Grange. That elevation allowed views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers from the house’s capacious windows and from the long piazzas that stretch along its sides. Those porches still give its Federalist-style solidity a faint hint of more Southern climes, thoroughly appropriate to its original owner, who was born, after all, in the West Indies.

But with its reopening this Saturday under the auspices of the National Park Service after a relocation and five years of renovations costing $14.5 million, this house may have finally found a home.

The building has actually been moved twice, the first time in 1889 (Hamilton’s widow had sold it in 1833), as the Manhattan street grid was creeping north. A developer donated it to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, which moved it 250 feet from its original hilltop to Convent Avenue at 141st Street, where it was used for worship. Over time it became hemmed in, by St. Luke’s new Romanesque building and by an apartment house that hugged its opposite side.

Though stripped of its porches and in disrepair it became a National Memorial in 1962; the National Park Service was given the house on the condition that it be moved and renovated. By the time that became plausible, in the 1990s, there was substantial neighborhood opposition to moving the house. Finally, in 2008, the house was mounted on hydraulic lifts, raised above the loggia of the church and rolled on dollies around the corner to the north end of St. Nicholas Park, where it now sits.

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Alexander Hamilton's Grange with its new neighbors in Hamilton Heights.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

But nothing about this journey has been easy. For more than a century the house has endured exile, migration and neglect, while inspiring dismay, controversy and much devotion.

This fate is not dissimilar to that of Hamilton himself, who has, for much of the last 200 years, been in the shadow of his fellow founding fathers. Unlike Washington and Jefferson, Hamilton was not born into the landed gentry. (This house is no Monticello or Mount Vernon.) Unlike them he was not a slaveholder. (He was active in the Manumission Society.) Unlike them he was an immigrant (from the Caribbean island of Nevis) without a respectable background. (He was the illegitimate son of a hapless Scottish merchant.) And unlike them too he had an entrepreneurial vision of the new nation, believing in manufacture as much as farming. His sympathies were urban rather than rural; he was probably the first renowned New Yorker in the United States.

This made him closer than his colleagues to the temperament of the immigrant nation that took shape over the following centuries. His impact was indelible. Hamilton laid the foundations for this country’s financial system as its first secretary of the Treasury; his ideas about a strong central government were expressed in the Federalist Papers and influenced the Constitution; and his opposition to Jeffersonian views established the first grounds for a two-party system.

But he was also a difficult man. He was brilliantly outspoken, prideful of his accomplishments, wary of human passions yet primed for confrontation. Some 10 duels had been averted before Hamilton was killed in one at 49, shot by Vice President Aaron Burr (just two years after this house was completed). This left it up to his critics (John Adams called him an “indefatigable and unprincipled intriguer”) to characterize (and mischaracterize) him, and left him a bit of an intellectual orphan in the history of American ideas.

Is it possible that this handsome restoration of his house — the only one Hamilton is known to have owned — might give further energy to the reassessments of Hamilton’s achievements that have been taking place in recent years? A crisp, intelligent exhibition about Hamilton and his accomplishments has been mounted on the basement level, created by Steve Laise of the National Park Service. It includes a interactive video display in which questions about Hamilton are answered by an avatar speaking Hamilton’s own words, along with additional commentary by Mr. Laise and the historian Joanne B. Freeman.

You cannot visit this house without becoming more curious about the man, his pride and his sensibility. Hamilton’s name for the estate may perhaps indicate an envy of the family and privilege that might have been his: his grandfather, also named Alexander Hamilton, was the laird of Grange in Ayrshire, Scotland. But the younger Hamilton was also arguing that some things could be carried over from the Old World without disrupting democratic ideals: why not a Grange overlooking the great waterways of the growing city of a new nation, a Grange that evolved not out of inheritance but the energy of ideas and labor?

And why not station in its entrance hall the bust that was made of him when he was Treasury secretary looking like a Roman senator? (A copy of that bust is still on display at the Grange.) Hamilton was always interested in the possibility of rewarding the elite without undermining the democratic spirit, and he was not a modest man. The Grange might have also been Hamilton’s rivalrous answer to Jefferson, for though he was not the designer of his own home as Jefferson was, he was closely involved in every detail with John McComb Jr., who was also the architect for both Gracie Mansion and New York’s City Hall.

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Items in the dining room, painted the original yellow, include a silver plateau, meant to reflect light from the candles it held, from Hamilton's time.Credit
Joshua Bright for The New York Times

The effect of all this is not heightened pomposity but a kind of gracious pleasure taken in what was being made possible. When Hamilton conceived of the house, he teased his wife about a secret “sweet project”: “You may guess and guess and guess again/Your guessing will be still in vain.”

Step into the first-floor parlor and dining rooms, and you can imagine the vistas this house once commanded, appreciate its openness to light and air, and understand the deep affection Hamilton had for it as he poured his scant capital into its construction. It does not stand above or apart from its surroundings, yet it possesses unmistakable authority and poise.

Stephen Spaulding, the chief of architectural preservation in the Northeast at the Park Service, has taken much care to temper the orthodoxies of restoration — which, in some historical homes, now leave everything in authentic, unrestored condition — with a willingness to create a memorial that could evoke the home as it was for the brief time when Hamilton lived here (1802-4).

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It has been an epic enterprise: the original plan was outlined in nearly 600 pages in a “Historical Structure Report” in 1980. Moldings, mantels and ornamentation have been reproduced from surviving evidence. Some original furniture — including chairs, tables and a Clementi-made fortepiano played by Hamilton’s daughter — is here, but so are reproductions, including one, of Hamilton’s desk, just completed by Fallon & Wilkinson, cabinetmakers and conservators in Baltic, Conn., after the original at the Museum of the City of New York.

There was also a controversy over the house as currently oriented: it has been rotated from the original position it had when Hamilton built it; its front door now faces northeast rather than southwest. But if it hadn’t been reoriented, the view of the house from West 141st Street would have been of its undistinguished rear rather than its front facade, which will become even more welcoming as Hamilton’s circular flower garden is reproduced according to his written instructions. (“A garden, you know,” he wrote in 1802, “is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician.”)

No better setting could now be imagined for the Grange; streets nearby still bear Hamilton’s name, and the land where it now sits was part of the original Grange acreage.

But the measure of the Grange’s success will not be in its use of appropriate moldings or plantings, but in its effectiveness in increasing awareness of one of the country’s most intriguing founding fathers and illuminating the peculiarities of his genius. The issues Hamilton raised — about debt and investment, about the expectations we should have of government, and about the tension between democratic ideals and high accomplishments — are with us still.